Talking with the Animals: Dillard, Doolittle, and the Puritan Aesthetic

"I want to walk with the animals, talk with the
animals," famously proclaimed Dr. Doolittle, the
fictional animal-lover whose popularity in a series of
children's books from the 1920s and 1930s spawned a
musical in 1967, and two very bad Eddie Murphy films
in the 1990s. Dr. Doolittle is hardly alone; the
desire to 'talk with the animals' is a notable
characteristic of homo sapiens. No other creature on
earth shares such a stubborn yearning for
inter-species communication; and it remains to be seen
that any shares the ability. Nontheless, we humans
continue to empathize with, and hallucinate
reciprocated empathy from, the seemingly indifferent
animals that surround us, a syndrome I shall refer to
as DoDo (Doctor Doolittlitus). That Dr. Doolittle was
able to realize the secret desire of many of us is
likely the nature of his lasting appeal.

Annie Dillard continues the tradition of imagined
connection with our Animal Brethren when she waxes
philosophical about insects in Pilgrim at Tinker
Creek (section two, p. 63). Though Dillard seems
willing to provide bugs the esteem she is able to
bestow upon other members of the animal kingdom, she
can't seem to get her mind around their emminent
unhumanness (inhumanity):

"Fish gotta swim and bird gotta fly;
insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after
another. I never ask why of a vulture or shark, but I
ask why of almost every insect I see. More than one
insect-- the possibility of fertile reproduction-- is
an assault on all human value, all hope of a
reasonable god" [63].

Dillard reveals an important component of DoDo in
this passage: we are willing to accept animals, not as
they are, but as we want them to be; which is to say,
they must be as similar to us as possible. This
should perhaps not surprise us, given typical human
attitudes within the species. We are meant to
sympathize with the disappointment insects have
brought Dillard, as she describes the various ways the
obstinate creatures refuse to be human-like (they are
immoral and total imbecils), particularly in the
scientific work of J. Henri Fabre (who is both a
scientist and a Frenchman, giving his work particular
credibility).

Why do Dillard and Fabre, who are supposedly
nature-lovers, encounter such philsophical problems
when it comes to bugs? How does DoDo impact our sense
of kinship, and our sense of 'humane' treatment, with
various types of animals, for better or for worse?
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published in 1974,
during the same years humans were running the first
(unsuccessful) attempts to teach chimps human
language. Is this merely a coincidence?

Dillard, clearly repulsed, makes numerous
references in this section to the "profligate"
reproduction of insects (and Nature on the whole). As
a self-professed "pilgrim," we might wonder what, if
anything, Puritanism has to do with all of this. What
do you think?